This may come as news to you, but for the USA our dependence on carbon-based fuels (or at least imports of same) is directly responsible for the sluggish economy of the last year or so. High oil prices have raised fuel expenditures, which has cut the remainder of disposable income; every dollar that goes for Venezuelan or Nigerian or Saudi oil is a dollar that can't buy American goods and services, and anything pulled out of savings tends to reduce people's willingness to spend.
Lots of the ways we use fuel are simply idiotic. A dollar spent on insulation can save much more than that in natural gas over as little as ten years, and there are many other examples of savings which come free or even pay you back after you consider the reduction in expenditures for fuel. Hybrid cars pay off after 60,000 miles or so (4-5 years) at current pump prices; if you consider the cost of protecting Middle East supplies as part of the full cost of auto fuel it would be less than 2 years. Notice that I haven't mentioned "environmental externalities" yet.
The "energy intensity" of industrialized economies has been falling steadily for decades, and continues to fall. Every year we need less and less fuel to make a dollar's worth of economic output. What's wrong with trying to accelerate this trend, if we have worthwhile things to gain from it?
Right. And until they have a solid, convincing theory to account for this 'why', then we've only got (at best) a correlation between the two events - this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship between them.
It was obvious from the rest of the article that the researchers do not understand why the level of atmospheric methane is falling; the role of methane in the greenhouse effect is well understood.
As for why researchers don't understand why the atmospheric level of methane has stopped rising it's probably because they haven't been able to keep track of all the leaky pipelines, outgassing landfills, decaying swamps, farting cattle, and other sources of methane which constitute the sum total of all methane emissions. Then again, nobody has toted up the money for this to be done.
Columbia's trajectory stopped being controlled at the moment the left wing failed. True, it had slowed down quite a bit before that, but there are two factors to consider:
The escape velocity of Mars isn't all that high either, and
Plenty of pieces of unprotected Earth satellites make it down to the surface intact despite fully uncontrolled re-entry without any heat shielding.
If I recall correctly, the propellant tanks of the Iridium satellites were considered to be particular threats from that last should they have come down where people live.
I don't suppose you've heard of common earth organisms like Deinococcus Radiourans? This bug has such potent DNA-repair mechanisms that it survives very heavy irradiation (it apparently evolved them to recover from DNA damage during long periods of dryness, but they work for radiation-induced breakages too). And substantial parts of a spacecraft survive even an uncontrolled atmospheric entry; look at how much of Columbia came down, including large pieces of astronauts.
If someone sterilized the bird with something like chlorine monoxide it's a different matter, but I've seen nothing about this and an orbiter wouldn't normally need to be sterilized like a lander. That's why Galileo met its fiery end.
To be fair, the BSD license permits this. Is it really stealing if you accept something that somebody else gives you?
(Also, Microsoft has been accused of the same thing -- using *BSD code in their products. And as far as I can tell, this accusation is completely true -- but irrelevant, because it's not illegal or even `wrong'.)
No, and yes. The user (whether SCO or M$) has no legal obligation, and thus can't be legally accused of stealing anything. However, on the moral level it's otherwise. Both SCO and Microsoft are trying to crush all competition in their respective niches, and their use of the same free software that they are trying to get rid of is grossly hypocritical.
This is why the GPL is better for the world than the BSD license; it prevents attempts to take the commons private, and allows much more rapid advancement of the useful arts. (If you think having to work around a minefield of patent rights is a problem for software, consider that patents expire 5 times sooner than copyrights do.)
Maybe if they play Simcity for awhile, they'll realize that this invention might work much better if they do, in fact, build such a power plant with a few fire-stations nearby... but I'd imagine a real-world application would have some form of laser-alignment system that has the array blocked until it's properly aligned with the receiving station.
You don't use lasers for the alignment, you use microwaves. Actually, you use microwaves of roughly the same frequency as the transmission to you, and you modulate them with a pseudo-random encrypted stream of phase changes a la Code Division Multiple Access.
At the power transmitter, the beam from the ground is captured at many points along the array. The pseudo-random phase changes are subtracted, and the result determines the shape of the wavefront as it's arriving from the ground. This wave-front is then reversed, sending a stream of energy directly back to the transmitter which sent the alignment (actually, phase-reference) beam up to the satellite. Safety features:
The system is cryptographically secured against redirecting the beam.
The use of the phase-reference beam automatically compensates for variations in the refractive index of the atmosphere.
If the reference beam is lost, the myriad small emitters which form the power-transmitter phased array go out of coherence and effectively transmit all over space in a half-dipole pattern.
This addresses all of the major concerns. The real crime is that this was being written about in the late 1970's, and 20 years later people still have no clue about the groundwork. For this, I blame over-simplified games like... Sim City.
I've never really understood the "limited resources" argument. "We should pretend there's a shortage now, in order to postpone the date of the real shortage". It doesn't make sense.
It does make sense if you consider that changing takes time and effort, and you can reduce your net costs by moving early and decreasing the price rise due to demand. All of this is pertinent to oil.
Of course, the argument can be even simpler than that depending on the flexibility of suppliers. Suppose that OPEC's ability to reduce production is about 10% of US demand, and that the world demand will pick up that 10% if the price of oil falls from $30 to $20/bbl. If we reduced our demand by 20%, the net demand reduction would reduce our expenses from 1 * 30 to 0.8 * 20, or about $16 per pre-cut barrel. The marginal saving would be $14 saved / 0.2 barrels saved = $70/bbl. You can consider that the true economic cost of oil, and that's not including the cost of fighting terrorists financed by oil money, cleaning up oil spills, and any other ecological problems which result.
It's not like we're going to wake up one morning and world oil production is suddenly at zero, thus destroying civilization as we know it in some sort of Mad Max parody.
You don't need a shortage of a raw material for it to cause you problems. For instance, London woke up one day and found that their plentiful supplies of coal were literally choking the city to death with the smoke. There was no shortage of phosphates to soften water for laundry detergent, but the amount being dumped into rivers was killing Lake Erie.
Los Angeles found that the hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides generated by the cars there, combined with heat and sunlight, made very nasty smog. Fortunately it was a local phenomenon, and engines could be altered to either generate different products or convert them to non smog-generating gases. But when the problematic product is CO2 and the area affected is the whole planet, you don't have those options.
Moving to those technologies now, while oil is still cheaper and the infrastructure is already well in place, would have an even bigger impact on the cost of living. Furthermore, it would have a huge impact on economic growth. We'd be saving our children (or grandchildren, or whatever) the cost of conversion, by taking that cost on ourselves. But it seems likely that our descendants will have more wealth available to pay those costs than we do.
You are making the assumption that our use of oil has no costs that they'll have to bear, that the continued investment in oil infrastructure won't be an even greater financial hurdle for them to leap, or that the lack of experience with alternatives won't impose greater expenses and more onerous difficulties than beginning the process now, when we recognize the need and have the ability. I believe that all three of these assumptions are questionable at best, and the first is definitely false for both ecological and geopolitical reasons.
Another thing is, they're called "resources" because we use them for stuff. If they just sit there, not being used, they're not resources and there is no shortage. Saving resources for future generations makes no sense. There's no reason to think they have any greater need for iron (say), than we do, or that they'll make better use of it than we are.
That's true to a point, but some "resources" can only be used so fast without being overwhelmed or destroyed. Examples include the ability of a forest to produce wood, the ability of a river to break down organic matter, or the capacity of the earth's systems to sequester carbon dioxide. Overuse of the resource for one purpose can deplete or destroy its capabilities to produce other goods (wildlife, fish, a consistent and livable climate). It behooves us not to push things too far, especially before we've got good reason to believe it won't do any harm (as opposed to the current situation of having good reason to believe it will).
The situation is in the middle of reversing itself
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The End of the Oil Age
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My two biggest gripes are still the weight and the charge time-- not so much the capacity.
Max continuous charge rate on today's Li-ion cells is 3C; that's 20 minutes from zero to full, or 12 minutes from 20% to 80%. (I doubt that the 3C charge rate is sustainable at close to full charge, you'd exceed the maximum cell voltage.) Lead-acid batteries can be fast-charged even more quickly (15 minutes) using reverse-current pulses to remove hydrogen bubbles on the electrodes.
I don't know about you, but when I stop, 15 minutes isn't a big penalty. If I could get 180 miles of range on the motor into the batteries at the same time I put 5 gallons into the tank, 15 minutes would be a very reasonable stop. It takes me that long to set up the pump, pee, check the snacks and pay. If I could snag a charge at highway rest areas and restaurants, I'd be even better off.
How long is the charge cycle for a car-sized Li-ion battery? If I drive to chicago, and have to stop 3 times on the 180-mile trip, that's no big deal.
Something like the Li-ion tzero would go the whole distance and leave you something between 60 and 120 miles of extra range, all on one charge. With a depletion-mode hybrid (one that runs its batteries down for main power instead of recharging them from the sustainer all the time), you just wouldn't care.
And what does 1000lbs. of extra weight do to the performance and efficiency of a vehicle?
Ask the makers of the tzero and Tango about that. Both of them go like hell, and the Tango claims an operating cost (electricity and battery degradation) about half the cost of gasoline, for near-optimal battery cycling. (Abuse your batteries with deep, frequent discharges and they'll die early. Again, this is not a problem with a depletion-mode hybrid; you could just program it to run the sustainer whenever the cost of additional depletion of the battery rose to a level you find unacceptable.)
If we get better batteries, i'm all for it. Anything that gets us off of systems fixed to one energy source.
The battery performance is here already, and the cost is coming down rapidly. These things will be here in a flash, and you know what? Detroit won't be ready. They're going to be caught flat-footed. Again.
Hybrids are far and away the most practical solution available now, but fail to wean us off gasoline.
The next stage in hybrids is to take some energy from the grid. If you combine the increased efficiency of hybrids with the ability to run some distance entirely without fuel, you start making a serious dent in gasoline consumption. And it wouldn't take much; according to Commuter Cars the average person only commutes 22 miles a day. If you did only 10 miles on electricity and got 45 MPG for the rest, your average mileage skyrockets to 82.5 MPG (22 miles_total * 45 MPG / 12 miles_on_gas).
Imagine cutting your gasoline consumption by 2/3, with no sacrifices. It's doable, hell, it's off the shelf. We should demand that it be done.
If most of the "lost" carbon from the original plants escaped relatively quickly, then it would have been available for other plants to consume in the same time frame. Some tiny fraction of their carbon remained fixed, but the rest became available for more plants....
The result is that the fossil fuel inventory would have been constructed from a very slow "skimming" of the dregs of the process of carbon fixation. Of course it was inefficient; laying down deposits wasn't the purpose for which the plants evolved!
The sensors are placed on freeway entrance ramps (that's how they can catch pollution from vehicles accelerating). These are usually one lane, so only one vehicle goes by at a time; no question of nailing you for the car next to you. Further, if the sensor is reading continuously it is going to see how fast each car's plume dissipates and whether your car was actually adding to what was there before it or just driving through it.
Given California's pollution problems, finding ways to remove the gross polluters (the low-hanging fruit) means a huge savings because you can avoid having to eke out the fractional-percent in the remaining available improvements in other things. This is what cost-efficiency is about.
Hydrogen is a better battery, however counterintuitive that is.
... and except when hydrogen isn't. Which is the situation now.
Have you looked at the range figures for the HyWire and the other hydrogen fuel-cell "miracle cars"? They get something like 60 miles to a fill-up. That's because the volumetric efficiency of hydrogen "sucks", to use your term.
Compare to batteries. You can now buy a 200 AH Li-ion cell that weighs 5.5 kg. At a nominal 3.6 volts, I make that 131 watt-hours per kilogram. Storing 60 KWH (enough energy to go 300 miles at 200 WH/mile) would require just about 1000 pounds of batteries, and batteries have the advantage that they can be stuffed under seats, in floor pans, and in all kinds of places that you can't put fuel tanks or engines. (The same argument has been made for fuel cells - put 'em in the doors!) Electric motors are very light and relatively small compared to engines, and need only a feed of cooling air to be happy (compared to air, exhaust, coolant, oil and fuel for an engine).
The complaint still stands that you "can't get in your electric car and drive all day". Fine, make it a hybrid with an engine just big enough to provide cruising power. If you've got a 5 gallon tank of biodiesel and your sustainer gives you 50 MPG, you can cruise for over 500 miles before you need to stop. Thats enough for almost any purpose. It's more than enough for most people's bladder capacity. And if you plugged it in every day, you'd do the vast majority of your driving without burning a drop of fuel from the tank.
Last, lead-acid batteries are recycled at a very high rate. There is nothing to prevent Li-ion batteries from being recycled too, especially if they were changed out by the hundreds of pounds rather than a couple AA cells at a time.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: hydrogen is a distraction, which is being skilfully exploited by people who don't want the status quo to move. You say "Hydrogen", they'll say "Great! We'll have it in 2020", and they will use it as an excuse to do nothing for the next ten years.
Look at the facts:
Hydrogen does not occur free in nature; it is not a source of energy. It is a medium for transmitting energy.
Hydrogen is an inefficient method for transmitting most forms of energy. For instance, wind power is better transmitted over wires than via electrolysis to hydrogen and recombination in a remote fuel cell.
The most reasonable projections for large-scale use of hydrogen still say 20 years. By way of comparison, this was also the projection for large-scale use of fusion power... in the 1960's.
There are competitive methods of transmitting the energy created by most prime movers, for which we already have infrastructure which can be leveraged.
Hydrogen provides a method for storing energy, but we have alternate ways of doing this also.
The last two are arguably the most important. As a for-instance, suppose that all 200+ million cars in the USA carried 20 kilowatt-hours of battery storage. This would be sufficient to drive an average car roughly 40-50 miles at 50% discharge. The total energy storage of those cars would be 4 TERAWATT hours, or about 7 hours of the full nameplate production capacity of all the electric powerplants in the USA. If you assumed 60 KWH per car (about what the Li-ion tzero carries), that figure goes up to 12 TWH.
I'm sure most people have heard that if everyone in the country tried to fill their car's gas tanks on the same day, all the gas stations would run dry. This underlines how much energy storage there is in that medium. A nation of battery-powered vehicles would do the same for electricity, and we don't need anything more than incremental improvements in existing infrastructure to make it happen. We can start today, with modest changes in hybrid vehicles which use power from the grid in addition to fuel from the pump. As batteries improve and get cheaper, we use more batteries and less fuel.
That is the big difference between hydrogen and everything else. We can put improvements into practice now, or we can wait 20 years for there to be a new hydrogen infrastructure to support the new hydrogen systems (and neither will be useful without the other). That's why hydrogen is a distraction.
Average age of a car in the US is older than that, and I have a car that is older than many Slashdotters which is still running just fine. (I keep it because it gets better gas mileage than almost anything I could get today, which gives less money to the Venezuelan and Nigerian dictators, the Islamofascists, and other enemies of peace and freedom.)
I am familiar with the difference between aircraft turbines and road-vehicle turbines. In particular, aircraft turbines have little or no muffling on either intakes or exhausts, while road-vehicle turbines tend to have a fair amount of both.
The real point is that gas-turbine cars have been built, and they were very smooth and quiet. Regardless of what a particular system may create in decibels, it can be and has been done better than the screamers with which you are familiar.
If losses did run as high as 15% (I seem to recall 5% or less), that would reduce the plant-to-plug efficiency of a combined-cycle plant from 50% to 42.5%. That is still twice as high as the Ranger's 21% at best cruise. If you started with a steam turbine at 33% and knocked 15% off it, that's 28% net (0.33 * (1 - 0.15))... and assumes that you have no use for the spent steam as e.g. industrial process heat.
I would think that you could drive a generator with a gas-fired turbine, keep the electric motors on the wheels
It's been done, or close enough.
and get much more efficiency than most cars while allowing you to use the current energy storage infrastructure (IE: gas stations.)
And you'd be wrong. Did you ever wonder why none of the high-efficiency hybrid vehicles uses a gas turbine? It's because you need regenerators and a bottoming-cycle to get decent efficiency out of one, and you can't shoehorn those systems into a car's engine bay. To make matters worse, the part-throttle efficiency of gas turbines is far lower than even Otto-cycle engines.
I can't imagine that a turbine would be much heavier than the huge batteries these things require.
No, it would be much lighter. But weight isn't everything; it mostly affects rolling resistance, which is much smaller than air resistance at cruising speed. If I am doing my acceleration with energy recaptured from regenerative braking, added weight hardly matters.
The tzero has a top speed of over 100 MPH with the Li-ion batteries. The vehicle speed is RPM limited by the single-speed axle, so the Ferrari would have an unfair advantage over a full 1/4 mile track.
How are electrical cars more energy efficent than gas powered ones?
Among other things, electric cars don't sit in traffic with their engines idling but doing no work. They also have no throttling losses from operating at part load.
We get the majority of our electricity from burning fossil fuels.
If you have e.g. a Ford Ranger which uses 300 watt-hours/mile at the wheels while getting 25 miles per gallon at cruise, it is operating at about 21% efficiency. A typical old-technology coal-fired steam turbine gets 30-35% efficiency, a gas-fired combined-cycle turbine plant can beat 50% handily, and other technologies can probably hit 60% or more. If these are used along with co-generation to supply heat for other uses, total utilization of the fuel can probably exceed 80%. That's four times what the truck can get on its own.
If we all convert over to electrical cars, will be not just burning more oil and coal in our power plants?
But given the higher efficiency, we'll be burning less overall. We'll also have the option of supplying cars from nuclear, wind, hydropower or solar; anything that makes electricity is the same as far as the car is concerned.
The substantial storage capacity of electric car battery packs would also give benefits for the electrical grid (which should be high on our list of priorities after 8/14/2003). See the papers at acpropulsion.com about vehicle-to-grid ancillary services.
And no, I have no relationship with these guys, I just think they're clever and have a damned good idea.
In warm climes perhaps, but shut down a diesel too long in some place cold like Alaska and I challenge you to restart it without expending a rather considerable amount of power to reheat the sludge more commonly known as diesel fuel.
That's simple; you just never let it get cold. One of your dump loads can be an electric heater for a big vat of excess coolant, and you circulate that as required to keep everything ready to go.
And it's going to take a lot longer than a few seconds.
Diesel generators can be started up and shut down almost at will. They can be "scheduled" on the order of seconds. Further, they have low idling losses. This makes them a pretty good match to wind power; you use wind (and a dump load) to supply as much power as you can, and fill in the gaps with diesel when wind falls short. This would all but certainly cost a lot less than the $28,000 per capita that the reactor will go for.
Nuclear has the advantage that you can go completely fossil-free, but I'm not sure that it's the most cost-effective. For that matter, neither is hydrogen. When you compare the losses in powerplant -> battery -> motor with powerplant -> electrolyzer -> compression or hydride storage -> fuel cell -> motor, it's obvious that hydrogen is a losing proposition on the basics and needs some other advantage to bring it up to parity. Aside from the possibility of compatibility with current engines (though not vehicle designs due to inadequate size of fuel tank spaces), I don't see what that advantage could be.
if you believe in the big bang, you believe in a religion. the religion of science
Congratulations, you just confirmed that the creationists are your intellectual brothers. When they failed to get "creation science" recognized as science instead of religion, they turned to claiming that science was a religion. You ate their propaganda without a hiccup, and now you're repeating it like a protective spell. What does it protect you from? Thought and reason?
science has not answered where everything came from. there was not a big bang of nothingness. if nothing blows up, nothing happens.
And you know this how? Doesn't your explanation require a much greater (pardon the expression) leap of faith?
Let me draw an analogy for you. If I find some skid marks in the road ending at some broken glass, and a dead deer 30 feet away from the broken glass in the direction away from the skid marks, I don't go invoking divine explanations for the evidence. I conclude that a vehicle hit the deer and drove away, because that is the most parsimonious explanation which fits all the evidence. If I found a gunshot wound in the deer and found that the glass was actually leaded crystal I might entertain the possibility that the scene was actually set up by some performance artists who are also hunters, but that sure isn't going to be the first take.
I'm guessing vehicle. You're insisting performance artists. I laugh at you.
and just because science is there doesn't make religion a bunch of bullshit. i'm sure that a lot of those cosmologists and physicists are religious and belong to some faith that involves a god or gods. you can't go and tell me that they're all athiests.
You're implying that there is a contradiction between believing the evidence which proves there was a Big Bang, and being religious. This is a false dichotomy.
you'll never agree with me because you're an athiest
I am not an atheist, I am a militant agnostic. My war-cry is "I don't know, and you don't either!". If you don't have evidence to back up your claims, expect to be pressed to produce it and dismissed out of hand if you won't. Before you can find the truth, you first have to admit what you don't know.
Speaking of evidence, you have claimed twice that many "scientists" (qualifications unknown) don't believe in the Big Bang. I ask you for the third and last time: how do you know this (who performed the survey, who was surveyed, et cetera).
but the big bang theory has not been proven even mostly true. too many people who study science disagree with it.
This is the second time you've said this, and you've failed to back it up both times. First, you're wrong; the Big Bang theory's predictions have proven true time and time again (from the Hubble recession to the Cosmic Microwave Background and now to the predictions of the theory of inflation, which left the predicted fluctuations in the CMBR). Second, you have not said who was surveyed and whether they have studied the matter in depth and have to be taken seriously, or if they have done no research and are basing their positions on personal, religious, "post-modernist" or other grounds which have nothing to do with the scientific merits. Who was surveyed? Who conducted the survey? Do they have an axe to grind? You'd ask the same questions if someone was asserting e.g. that loss of species from a biome is irrelevant to its stability or human interests, so stop playing favorites.
evolution is also contested by many, but the fact of the matter remains that evolution happens.
Why is it so hard for you to accept that the Big Bang happened? The evidence is just as solid even if it lies in an area of physics which is outside your area of competence. (The study of cosmology and the study of high-energy physics are closely intertwined, and if you didn't know that you have no business making claims about either one.)
and you still haven't told me why religion is a bunch of bullshit. you ahvent' proven to me why god does not exist.
My response:
It's the behavior of people which is bullshit. (Like the people who repeat the fallacies of the argument from ignorance or the argument from antiquity, as if either one validates their point rather than proving their lack of support for their conclusion.)
It's a logical impossibility to prove a negative (as you should have known had you ever studied logic). Besides, the burden of proof lies on the person making the assertion.
so where's the proof? where's the scientific evidence?
Extensively documented. If you can't even be bothered to stay current with popular publications like Science News, you can look up "Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe" on the web and start there; a search on the reason that the Hubble space telescope got that name would enlighten you also (hint, it's because of the Hubble recession, which is a consequence of the Big Bang). If you think that the USA would spend hundreds of millions to investigate "bullshit", and that thousands of researchers would put their support behind this rather than other fields of inquiry, you're in worse shape than I thought. You make me fear for the future of science education in the United States, and I hope you are never paid to teach your misconceptions to others.
"a young vibrant enthusiastic scientist was riding on a train in france..."
Reasoning by apocryphal story? Somehow I'd expect that of you.
from what i've learned, "chaos" was a big mass of large particles that broke up into smaller particles.
Then you haven't learned much. Even popular treatments of the subject (like Stephen Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time", or "The First Three Seconds") go into much better detail. Everyone has a right to an informed opinion. It doesn't sound like you qualify.
and you can't prove or disprove either one
"Proof" and "disproof" are not well-defined in the context of science (unlike mathematics). More to the point, you can never "prove" anything in science, you can only confirm it to a very high degree of confidence. The converse is not so true; for all intents and purposes we can consider platygeanism, the phlogiston theory of combustion, the four-elements theory of matter and the like to be disproven; they are utterly useless for describing the real world.
so either you go by religion or you go by pure science, and i can tell you that the majority of scientists don't agree with teh big band theory.
True, most scientists subscribe to the symphony orchestra theory. <vbg>
Seriously, I think you're full of hooey. (Where's the survey? Conducted by whom?) And even if "most scientists" disagree, it's a fact that "most scientists" are not cosmologists; they are not the people actually studying the matter. Among cosmologists there is no question and has not been since the discovery of the CBR; everyone else is outside their field and their opinion is worthless.
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Lots of the ways we use fuel are simply idiotic. A dollar spent on insulation can save much more than that in natural gas over as little as ten years, and there are many other examples of savings which come free or even pay you back after you consider the reduction in expenditures for fuel. Hybrid cars pay off after 60,000 miles or so (4-5 years) at current pump prices; if you consider the cost of protecting Middle East supplies as part of the full cost of auto fuel it would be less than 2 years. Notice that I haven't mentioned "environmental externalities" yet.
The "energy intensity" of industrialized economies has been falling steadily for decades, and continues to fall. Every year we need less and less fuel to make a dollar's worth of economic output. What's wrong with trying to accelerate this trend, if we have worthwhile things to gain from it?
As for why researchers don't understand why the atmospheric level of methane has stopped rising it's probably because they haven't been able to keep track of all the leaky pipelines, outgassing landfills, decaying swamps, farting cattle, and other sources of methane which constitute the sum total of all methane emissions. Then again, nobody has toted up the money for this to be done.
- The escape velocity of Mars isn't all that high either, and
- Plenty of pieces of unprotected Earth satellites make it down to the surface intact despite fully uncontrolled re-entry without any heat shielding.
If I recall correctly, the propellant tanks of the Iridium satellites were considered to be particular threats from that last should they have come down where people live.If someone sterilized the bird with something like chlorine monoxide it's a different matter, but I've seen nothing about this and an orbiter wouldn't normally need to be sterilized like a lander. That's why Galileo met its fiery end.
This is why the GPL is better for the world than the BSD license; it prevents attempts to take the commons private, and allows much more rapid advancement of the useful arts. (If you think having to work around a minefield of patent rights is a problem for software, consider that patents expire 5 times sooner than copyrights do.)
See this response for a rebuttal of that point.
At the power transmitter, the beam from the ground is captured at many points along the array. The pseudo-random phase changes are subtracted, and the result determines the shape of the wavefront as it's arriving from the ground. This wave-front is then reversed, sending a stream of energy directly back to the transmitter which sent the alignment (actually, phase-reference) beam up to the satellite. Safety features:
- The system is cryptographically secured against redirecting the beam.
- The use of the phase-reference beam automatically compensates for variations in the refractive index of the atmosphere.
- If the reference beam is lost, the myriad small emitters which form the power-transmitter phased array go out of coherence and effectively transmit all over space in a half-dipole pattern.
This addresses all of the major concerns. The real crime is that this was being written about in the late 1970's, and 20 years later people still have no clue about the groundwork. For this, I blame over-simplified games like... Sim City.Of course, the argument can be even simpler than that depending on the flexibility of suppliers. Suppose that OPEC's ability to reduce production is about 10% of US demand, and that the world demand will pick up that 10% if the price of oil falls from $30 to $20/bbl. If we reduced our demand by 20%, the net demand reduction would reduce our expenses from 1 * 30 to 0.8 * 20, or about $16 per pre-cut barrel. The marginal saving would be $14 saved / 0.2 barrels saved = $70/bbl. You can consider that the true economic cost of oil, and that's not including the cost of fighting terrorists financed by oil money, cleaning up oil spills, and any other ecological problems which result.
You don't need a shortage of a raw material for it to cause you problems. For instance, London woke up one day and found that their plentiful supplies of coal were literally choking the city to death with the smoke. There was no shortage of phosphates to soften water for laundry detergent, but the amount being dumped into rivers was killing Lake Erie.Los Angeles found that the hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides generated by the cars there, combined with heat and sunlight, made very nasty smog. Fortunately it was a local phenomenon, and engines could be altered to either generate different products or convert them to non smog-generating gases. But when the problematic product is CO2 and the area affected is the whole planet, you don't have those options.
You are making the assumption that our use of oil has no costs that they'll have to bear, that the continued investment in oil infrastructure won't be an even greater financial hurdle for them to leap, or that the lack of experience with alternatives won't impose greater expenses and more onerous difficulties than beginning the process now, when we recognize the need and have the ability. I believe that all three of these assumptions are questionable at best, and the first is definitely false for both ecological and geopolitical reasons. That's true to a point, but some "resources" can only be used so fast without being overwhelmed or destroyed. Examples include the ability of a forest to produce wood, the ability of a river to break down organic matter, or the capacity of the earth's systems to sequester carbon dioxide. Overuse of the resource for one purpose can deplete or destroy its capabilities to produce other goods (wildlife, fish, a consistent and livable climate). It behooves us not to push things too far, especially before we've got good reason to believe it won't do any harm (as opposed to the current situation of having good reason to believe it will).I don't know about you, but when I stop, 15 minutes isn't a big penalty. If I could get 180 miles of range on the motor into the batteries at the same time I put 5 gallons into the tank, 15 minutes would be a very reasonable stop. It takes me that long to set up the pump, pee, check the snacks and pay. If I could snag a charge at highway rest areas and restaurants, I'd be even better off.
Something like the Li-ion tzero would go the whole distance and leave you something between 60 and 120 miles of extra range, all on one charge. With a depletion-mode hybrid (one that runs its batteries down for main power instead of recharging them from the sustainer all the time), you just wouldn't care. Ask the makers of the tzero and Tango about that. Both of them go like hell, and the Tango claims an operating cost (electricity and battery degradation) about half the cost of gasoline, for near-optimal battery cycling. (Abuse your batteries with deep, frequent discharges and they'll die early. Again, this is not a problem with a depletion-mode hybrid; you could just program it to run the sustainer whenever the cost of additional depletion of the battery rose to a level you find unacceptable.) The battery performance is here already, and the cost is coming down rapidly. These things will be here in a flash, and you know what? Detroit won't be ready. They're going to be caught flat-footed. Again. The next stage in hybrids is to take some energy from the grid. If you combine the increased efficiency of hybrids with the ability to run some distance entirely without fuel, you start making a serious dent in gasoline consumption. And it wouldn't take much; according to Commuter Cars the average person only commutes 22 miles a day. If you did only 10 miles on electricity and got 45 MPG for the rest, your average mileage skyrockets to 82.5 MPG (22 miles_total * 45 MPG / 12 miles_on_gas).Imagine cutting your gasoline consumption by 2/3, with no sacrifices. It's doable, hell, it's off the shelf. We should demand that it be done.
The result is that the fossil fuel inventory would have been constructed from a very slow "skimming" of the dregs of the process of carbon fixation. Of course it was inefficient; laying down deposits wasn't the purpose for which the plants evolved!
Given California's pollution problems, finding ways to remove the gross polluters (the low-hanging fruit) means a huge savings because you can avoid having to eke out the fractional-percent in the remaining available improvements in other things. This is what cost-efficiency is about.
Have you looked at the range figures for the HyWire and the other hydrogen fuel-cell "miracle cars"? They get something like 60 miles to a fill-up. That's because the volumetric efficiency of hydrogen "sucks", to use your term.
Compare to batteries. You can now buy a 200 AH Li-ion cell that weighs 5.5 kg. At a nominal 3.6 volts, I make that 131 watt-hours per kilogram. Storing 60 KWH (enough energy to go 300 miles at 200 WH/mile) would require just about 1000 pounds of batteries, and batteries have the advantage that they can be stuffed under seats, in floor pans, and in all kinds of places that you can't put fuel tanks or engines. (The same argument has been made for fuel cells - put 'em in the doors!) Electric motors are very light and relatively small compared to engines, and need only a feed of cooling air to be happy (compared to air, exhaust, coolant, oil and fuel for an engine).
The complaint still stands that you "can't get in your electric car and drive all day". Fine, make it a hybrid with an engine just big enough to provide cruising power. If you've got a 5 gallon tank of biodiesel and your sustainer gives you 50 MPG, you can cruise for over 500 miles before you need to stop. Thats enough for almost any purpose. It's more than enough for most people's bladder capacity. And if you plugged it in every day, you'd do the vast majority of your driving without burning a drop of fuel from the tank.
Last, lead-acid batteries are recycled at a very high rate. There is nothing to prevent Li-ion batteries from being recycled too, especially if they were changed out by the hundreds of pounds rather than a couple AA cells at a time.
Look at the facts:
- Hydrogen does not occur free in nature; it is not a source of energy. It is a medium for transmitting energy.
- Hydrogen is an inefficient method for transmitting most forms of energy. For instance, wind power is better transmitted over wires than via electrolysis to hydrogen and recombination in a remote fuel cell.
- The most reasonable projections for large-scale use of hydrogen still say 20 years. By way of comparison, this was also the projection for large-scale use of fusion power... in the 1960's.
- There are competitive methods of transmitting the energy created by most prime movers, for which we already have infrastructure which can be leveraged.
- Hydrogen provides a method for storing energy, but we have alternate ways of doing this also.
The last two are arguably the most important. As a for-instance, suppose that all 200+ million cars in the USA carried 20 kilowatt-hours of battery storage. This would be sufficient to drive an average car roughly 40-50 miles at 50% discharge. The total energy storage of those cars would be 4 TERAWATT hours, or about 7 hours of the full nameplate production capacity of all the electric powerplants in the USA. If you assumed 60 KWH per car (about what the Li-ion tzero carries), that figure goes up to 12 TWH.I'm sure most people have heard that if everyone in the country tried to fill their car's gas tanks on the same day, all the gas stations would run dry. This underlines how much energy storage there is in that medium. A nation of battery-powered vehicles would do the same for electricity, and we don't need anything more than incremental improvements in existing infrastructure to make it happen. We can start today, with modest changes in hybrid vehicles which use power from the grid in addition to fuel from the pump. As batteries improve and get cheaper, we use more batteries and less fuel.
That is the big difference between hydrogen and everything else. We can put improvements into practice now, or we can wait 20 years for there to be a new hydrogen infrastructure to support the new hydrogen systems (and neither will be useful without the other). That's why hydrogen is a distraction.
Average age of a car in the US is older than that, and I have a car that is older than many Slashdotters which is still running just fine. (I keep it because it gets better gas mileage than almost anything I could get today, which gives less money to the Venezuelan and Nigerian dictators, the Islamofascists, and other enemies of peace and freedom.)
The real point is that gas-turbine cars have been built, and they were very smooth and quiet. Regardless of what a particular system may create in decibels, it can be and has been done better than the screamers with which you are familiar.
Imagine if every car sounded like a turbocharged car, without the rumble of the piston engine beneath it. It would be a big improvement.
Time to recycle an old sig.
The tzero has a top speed of over 100 MPH with the Li-ion batteries. The vehicle speed is RPM limited by the single-speed axle, so the Ferrari would have an unfair advantage over a full 1/4 mile track.
The substantial storage capacity of electric car battery packs would also give benefits for the electrical grid (which should be high on our list of priorities after 8/14/2003). See the papers at acpropulsion.com about vehicle-to-grid ancillary services.
And no, I have no relationship with these guys, I just think they're clever and have a damned good idea.
Another thing that occurs to me; if they're on the Yukon river, what stops them from using hydropower?
Nuclear has the advantage that you can go completely fossil-free, but I'm not sure that it's the most cost-effective. For that matter, neither is hydrogen. When you compare the losses in powerplant -> battery -> motor with powerplant -> electrolyzer -> compression or hydride storage -> fuel cell -> motor, it's obvious that hydrogen is a losing proposition on the basics and needs some other advantage to bring it up to parity. Aside from the possibility of compatibility with current engines (though not vehicle designs due to inadequate size of fuel tank spaces), I don't see what that advantage could be.
Let me draw an analogy for you. If I find some skid marks in the road ending at some broken glass, and a dead deer 30 feet away from the broken glass in the direction away from the skid marks, I don't go invoking divine explanations for the evidence. I conclude that a vehicle hit the deer and drove away, because that is the most parsimonious explanation which fits all the evidence. If I found a gunshot wound in the deer and found that the glass was actually leaded crystal I might entertain the possibility that the scene was actually set up by some performance artists who are also hunters, but that sure isn't going to be the first take.
I'm guessing vehicle. You're insisting performance artists. I laugh at you.
You're implying that there is a contradiction between believing the evidence which proves there was a Big Bang, and being religious. This is a false dichotomy. I am not an atheist, I am a militant agnostic. My war-cry is "I don't know, and you don't either!". If you don't have evidence to back up your claims, expect to be pressed to produce it and dismissed out of hand if you won't. Before you can find the truth, you first have to admit what you don't know.Speaking of evidence, you have claimed twice that many "scientists" (qualifications unknown) don't believe in the Big Bang. I ask you for the third and last time: how do you know this (who performed the survey, who was surveyed, et cetera).
- It's the behavior of people which is bullshit. (Like the people who repeat the fallacies of the argument from ignorance or the argument from antiquity, as if either one validates their point rather than proving their lack of support for their conclusion.)
- It's a logical impossibility to prove a negative (as you should have known had you ever studied logic). Besides, the burden of proof lies on the person making the assertion.
Extensively documented. If you can't even be bothered to stay current with popular publications like Science News, you can look up "Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe" on the web and start there; a search on the reason that the Hubble space telescope got that name would enlighten you also (hint, it's because of the Hubble recession, which is a consequence of the Big Bang). If you think that the USA would spend hundreds of millions to investigate "bullshit", and that thousands of researchers would put their support behind this rather than other fields of inquiry, you're in worse shape than I thought. You make me fear for the future of science education in the United States, and I hope you are never paid to teach your misconceptions to others.Seriously, I think you're full of hooey. (Where's the survey? Conducted by whom?) And even if "most scientists" disagree, it's a fact that "most scientists" are not cosmologists; they are not the people actually studying the matter. Among cosmologists there is no question and has not been since the discovery of the CBR; everyone else is outside their field and their opinion is worthless.